Stories of family and ancestors who lived and worked in Cohoes (textile and garment workers, butchers and barbers), Waterford (canalers), Whitehall (farmers and canalers), Port Henry (iron miners and Civil War soldiers), Champlain (canalers and farmers) and other towns along the Champlain Canal in New York State with some diversions to the places they emigrated from....Quebec (landless farmers, shoemakers, sailors, soldiers), Acadia (more farmers), and even Cornwall, England (tin miners).

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

The following is a guest contribution from DC, a Wills/Bissonnette/Kaigle/
Göckel descendant who visited TB, a 5th+ cousin in Sprackbruken Germany in Spring 2012. These cousins descended from the Göckel family in Sprabruken. Anton Frederich Göckel, a Hessan soldier, fought for the British in the American Revolution and settled in Québec after the war where he fathered a large family. Anton Göckel is the great great great great great grandfather of DC. Here is DC's story of his visit to Sprackbruken....

The cloud cover concealed the view
until the final half minute of landing. I leaned over to see my first
view of Germany, and I smiled immediately. I could see orderly, neat
towns surrounded by green fields. By American standards, the villages
and towns are packed in the country. After all, 80 million or so
people are living in an area that an American might think suitable
for 20 or 30 million!

I get off the plane, and two Polizei
are waiting, checking passports. Man…I should not have trusted that
website, is what I first thought! I was told it was an easy border.
But, I walk up and before I say a word, he sees the American passport
and waves me on. Just checking Turks, I guess.

The airport fulfills the stereotype of
Germany. Neat, clean, automated and high tech. No low-wage
Brooklynites to give me a cavity search like JFK. Nope…I walk
through this automated scanner thing, with no personnel in sight
(though I’m sure that if I came up positive for something, somebody
would swarm me in short order.) The scan is basically done between
the two automatic doors you walk through like in a grocery store, and
you’re let in. Then, you wait in a line for a stamp in your
passport, no one asks you why you’re there, how long you’ll be,
etc. Then, finally, customs. I have nothing to declare, so I
volunteer myself for the no-declare option, which is to walk past the
inspecting police. What kind of hapless smuggler or drug dealer would
volunteer himself for the declaration section, I do not know. Either
way, I grab my luggage and make my way to the section where family
awaits. I see a mustached German who seems to be looking for me, and
he puts his arms out like a “long time, no see!” kind of way.
It’s T.B., the long-lost cousin.

He quickly proves to have an affable
sense of humor. His last email describing what he’d be wearing, he
mentions a “peg-leg, hahaha.” Hm! There are no formalities
related to the reunion, just some hellos, musings about Germany, the
US, and the weather, of course. I notice how high tech even the
parking garage is- automated arms that come down to block any route
that leads to a full section of the garage. Gotta love it! Later on,
I also see a feature of German cities as you enter them- an
electronic sign, updated in real-time, telling you how many parking
spaces are available, and in which parking lot. This country has some
neat stuff, I tell you.

So, anyways, the cousin and I drive off
on the autobahn for his home. We get off the autobahn and we start
going down these perfectly paved, thin country roads. Not a crack or
pothole in sight, and perfectly painted lines. It’s getting to feel
like a movie at this point, wondering when the special effects are
supposed to stop. We roll through towns much like what I saw in the
descent- orderly, perfect little houses with red clay tile roofs,
small gardens with no weeds. As I said, the towns are packed tight,
so you can go through a Cambridge or Eagle Bridge-sized place, and
after another mile or two, find another. Between the towns are fields
larger than at home, believe it or not.

It’s rolling hills here,
and the crops seem to be mostly wheat, some rye, and sugar beets. Not
to rant, rave, or otherwise seem obsessive, but the rows of all the
crops are done perfectly, and you really wonder who’d go to such
great lengths to have acres upon acres of perfectly parallel rows.
Why, a German of course! It is really nice though, and in a way you
get caught up in the atmosphere. A few times, I have wanted to spit,
but couldn't, because my spit would be the first thing out of place
in the whole region for miles! Okay, an exaggeration. But really, the
towns are perfectly neat. Not cookie-cutter straight like an American
suburb, but winding and crooked, yet always neat with well-paved and
painted roads, well-signaged. It’s a place of order.

Thomas and I arrive to his house, which
he described as a “fixer-upper.” Damn…hate to see what his
reaction would be to an American fixer-upper! He tours me around,
showing me the beer/wine cellar (hell yes), his carpenter’s shop
(immaculate), where he makes his own window frames, door frames, et
cetera for fixing up the place. Then the machine shop where he
manufactures his own replacement parts for some vehicle projects.
Again, a perfectly organized little shop, and he shows me a hundred
year old tooling machine his grandfather gave him, still well-oiled
and working to this day. Impressive. Seriously. And neither of those
were his profession, he was in phone lines, telecom. He retired early
with an injury and now lives on a pension and plays with the house
project as he feels like it, restoring the building to more original
architecture.

He gives me a tour of the interior of
the house, and on the second floor I notice the family photographs. I
see old, mustached men in Prussian military uniforms, and I ask him
what period they were. 1870s, an ancestor of his, therefore another
cousin to me, generations removed, had served in the Franco-Prussian
war of 1870. I ask further, and it turns out that my/our Anton Göckel
was no black sheep in the family, it was in fact an old soldiering
family in Hessian tradition. Whatever the cause, Göckels were to
be found in the ranks, and the history shows this from the 1700s
onward. In World War I, of four Göckels in the family, four
served, and those, three are killed or injured. No males were alive
or available for World War Two, and the Göckel name died when
one of the World War One vets produced only two daughters.

In the coming days, I learn further of
Anton Göckel in detail. Thomas had documents he had prepared,
but they were in German and he had not passed them on yet. I feel
like an explorer as I first lay eyes on them and translate, and more
details come out. Anton Göckel was a citizen of
Hessen-Darmstadt, yet served in the army of Hessen-Hanau, how was
this? First, a quick note- the different “Hessen”s had once been
one princedom, but were split to two heirs once. One part was split
yet again, a generation later, leaving a total of three separate
political entities named “Hessen.” Anyways, it turns out Anton
Göckel fled from his Hessen-Darmstadt because the pay for
Hessen-Hanau soldiers was three times as much. The Hanau Jäger’s
monthly pay was equivalent to an average man’s six months of wages.
Our guy was a true mercenary, down to the core. I read the documents
further- his profession before the war, he was a professional hunter,
and known in the region for being a particularly good shot. That is
likely how he was allowed to serve with the Hessen-Hanau regiment
even though he was not a native.

Church where Anton Göckel was baptized in 1760

The terms of service for the
Hessen-Hanau Jägerkorps were generous, as they were the elite of
the elite. Pay three times better than most, six times better than a
civilian’s average, plus the right to settle in the New World if
they wished, after the war. The only stipulations- the Jägerkorps
was not allowed to dig trenches. It was actually in the contract!
They were to keep moving, always on the offensive.

With that in mind, we know already that
Anton Göckel fought at the Battle of Oriskany in mid-upstate New
York, less than an hour west of Albany. A force of American rebel
militia with Mohawk allies was ambushed by a small company of
Redcoats, a single company of Hessian Jäger’s, a few hundred
loyalist militia and, loyalist Mohawks. Not counting the British and
Germans, it was a vicious civil war, neighbor versus neighbor, as
both the rebel and loyalist militias were drawn from the same part of
New York. And of course, the Mohawks were divided. You can imagine
that Anton Göckel witnessed much savagery, as the battle was one
of the bloodiest of the entire American Revolution (as measured by
percentage of combatants injured or killed, where it stood at around
50%). Civil wars, wars of neighbors, are always the most brutal, as
the fights were often personal. The Anglo-Hessian-Loyalist force
prevailed in the course of the battle, but the long-term results fell
in favor of the colonists when they were forced to cede the ground
gained a few weeks later.

A detail emerged as I read, though.
Something I hadn't read or heard anywhere. Four Hessians were
captured by the retreating Americans. Anton Göckel was one of
them. Of the four, two of them ended up courting and marrying
American women during their imprisonment. Anton Göckel and a
companion, however, had no desire to clock out at that point. The two
of them escaped from their prison near the Syracuse area, and they
fled through the hundreds of miles of the Adirondack forest to make
their way to Montreal. They signed back up and were assigned to a new
unit, and they served the rest of their time as garrison soldiers
protecting Quebec from the threat of American invasion. In the course
of that time, Anton took a liking to a French Canadian girl there
(TB theorizes it may be the daughter of the family with whom he
was quartered) and married her (Marie Anne Maquet dit LaJoie) upon the end of the war. Their marriage was in Montréal on June 27, 1783.

And for relatives in American who are reading this, just think.....if Anton had not survived the battle,
the capture, the escape, would you or any of us be here? I guess not.
We are the result of one guy with a seriouswill to live.
Amazing.

Over the course of the stay, we drove
around to various points of interest in the area. TB lives in
Habitzheim, a village 4 kilometers from Spachbrücken, where
Anton Göckel was from. So, we of course went there, and I took
pictures of the church he had been baptized in. He was Protestant, in
a volatile region in Germany where the Catholic South and Protestant
North meet and partially intermingle. TB amusingly points out
that the battle still goes on today, though less violent- the two
village churches in Habitzheim have dueling bells on Sunday. Not a
bad way to channel religious aggression I’d say.

We also went to an artificial lake
built by one of our mutual ancestors in the 1600s as a fish farm, now
a protected bird habitat. Along with us went Thomas’s beagle, Karl.
What an excellent name for a beagle. Karl needed to be walked a lot,
and plenty of bathroom breaks for him, and so I had a very unexpected
pleasure of spending a lot of time walking in forests and
parks. Every few hours between villages, we took Karl for his duties
and I got yet another excuse to see forest. An added bonus was that
many of them were the very forests where Anton Göckel would have
hunted before he joined the Jägerkorps. The forests seemed to me
to be steeped in potential history. It was the border region of the
Roman Empire once, and I can imagine the Germanic and Celtic tribes
living here, resisting the Romans. Or, massacres and reprisals during
the Reformation as Protestant and Catholic towns butchered each
other. And, my World War Two history is a bit hazy, but I imagine the
Allies came through this area, as it’s so close to the French
border (two hours). The forests contain a weight that I don’t feel
at home. At home, you feel like you may be one of the few witnesses
of the more obscure forests. You may imagine Native Americans having
walked through, or you may picture a European trapper wandering
through, but you feel the forest’s untouched aspect. In Germany,
nothing is untouched, it seems. The human hand is always visible,
even if it’s just the neat little path winding through, or the
occasional hunter’s stand peering over a clearing.

A great big "thank you" to DC for this interesting contribution to our family history!

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“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. 1927.

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